The Doves of Mirhleft

The school year has passed quicker than most. It is, in the proverbial language of languishing undergraduates 'crunch time', and I have chosen to make some sort of an inaugural post for this new site. An exam looms in the near distance, but strangley becomes less threatening as the date approaches. What to speak of?

Cigarette smoking, a habit that had gone on for far too long in my life was quit three days ago. It's been on and off this year with the cancer sticks, I'd quit for 5 months last year before a 50 day stretch in a logging camp broke my will. As a tactic to combat the urge, I've embarked on a day to day exercise mania that seems to be working. Day one: climbed Mount Tzhouhalem with a friend of my dad's on Vancouver Island. The mountain is quite small, barely 500 meters off Cowichan Bay, and when we made it to the first summit (marked by a cross) we were met by a native father and three of his kids. The two girls gave us easter eggs and wished us a happy easter, before we continued on. As someone who spends his summers tree-brushing (read: cutting down deciduous trees with buzz-saws so that the coniferous trees grow faster for the logging companies - it pays the bills), and spends his off-time in a nasty port-o'-call by the name of Prince George, the native family was a welcome site. During the schoolyear, the only story getting newsplay concerned the beating death of a young girl by her native uncle and during the summer there's nothing but constant exposure to the racial slurs of brushers on the subject of natives. I was always raised with a high respect for the local natives (growing up in Calgary) as my family had ties with the Blood tribe that went back many years. Unfortunately, Prince George (asleast the downtown core) gives racists the ammunition they need. You kind of understand how a person can form stereotypes, if they have no background understanding to come from. The legacy of betrayal, violence and disease that our culture levied on the native populations is forgotten in the stumbling annoyance of a drunk begging for change.

It's like Africa in that way, the images we see are most usually of starving children in dusty villages. The news we hear about concerns little more than war and starvation. And yet I am hard pressed to find a more beautiful place on this earth than the small coastal town of Mirhleft in southern Morocco near the disputed region of the Spanish Sahara. To stay in a simple auberge run by a French ex-pat tucked away in the dusty lanes of the town and be woken into the deep blue of early morning by the inimitable Muslim call to prayer mixed with the cooing of nearby doves. There were no tourist attractions, the boarding was simple, and the beaches were devoid of locals and yet if money were no option, I'd board a plane for Marrakech and spend atleast a year in that town writing, reading, and drinking mint tea everyday.

Don't get me wrong, there was poverty in Morocco and I imagine a good portion of the populace don't have an easy time of it. However, in the words of a woman who travelled with us for a while and had travelled more extensively in sub-saharan Africa, the stress that we as Westerners put upon ourselves from waking hour until we collapse at night is taken in stride in Africa. When we flew out and landed in the UK, the first thing we noticed was that everyone on the streets of London seemed to be going somewhere else in a major hurry. Gone were the lazy cafes, and groups of locals chatting their way through the days events. After Morocco, London seemed cold, antisocial, sterile, and (though I never really put my finger down on the last one) there was a current of danger.

Bringing this back to the native family, it was just nice to have something stand out and say we're human before we're anything else, and race (as a social term) only matters when individual people insist on it. That, or I just thought it very nice that a couple of kids were willing to share their easter eggs with us (chocolate is a seriously valued commodity when hiking that the smallest child realises).

I had my first piece writing published a few days ago. I always thought I'd be able to twist the arm of some local fictional compilation and get a short story in edgewise. It turned out to be a news article I'd written on the forgotten genocide occuring in the tiny Angolan-occupied enclave of Cabinda for UBC's The Ubyssey. The night before the paper came out, the editor e-mailed me and told me to cut my 1700 word article to 650 at the max. This resulted in me cutting two-thirds (and a lot of the detail) out of it. I brought it to him, and he went to work on it. The result wasn't bad, the editor added a sentence of his own and used the rest of my article to indicate that there has indeed been a genocide occuring here since the Angolan invasion on 1975 that the world has causually forgot. Aside from spelling my name wrong below the title, the thing that struck me as odd was that he took out all mention of the fact (and its a supported fact), the American oil giant Chevron actually paid the Angolan troops to take over the oil fields of Cabinda, not to mention that they continue to pull 8 million dollars a day out of the resource-rich pocket of land. Their complicity in the genocide was excised from my writing. So I'm getting the full article published in an underground paper at the school. Anyone interested in finding out more about Cabinda should go to www.cabinda.net. The enclave is trying its best to get the world to notice what has been going on there for years.

The title of my blog is a reference to a series of mountaineering guides that have been published over the years. It also refers to a real feeling you get once you hoof it through miles of bush and arrive at a beautifully pristine alpine meadow. I got a taste of it this year with the Varsity Outdoors Club. The only trekking I've done at any real altitude came when I was in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. We trekked to the top of Jbel Toubkal (4167 meters), North Africa's highest mountain. It was a good two day slog through arid brushy valleys followed by a scramble through steep boulder fields to get to the summit. Once you're up there though, literally having the breath taken from you, in the words of our Berber guide "you are in a different world". I've rock climbed since high-school, but it was that experience that urged me to continue into the world of mountaineering.

I has planned on going to Nepal for 3 weeks of trekking in the Annapurna ranges before 3 more weeks of wandering around the countryside. Unfortunately, the country's security situation has been on a serious downhill slide since the new year. It's gone from a cancelled cease-fire with the Maoists to the King ordering security forces to shoot protestors in the space of a few months. So that trip was cancelled, and a return to Africa is in the works. Two and a half months of trekking and photography in Namibia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. It's a full brushing season away, but it seems closer every day.

As for the near future: climbing the lions in North Van tommorow, exam the next day, lead climbing in Squamish on friday. An early morning is taking its toll on me now. Enough ramblings for one post.